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This project degree paper is examining, analyzing and discussing the way towards the final interpretation of a piece of music. As a musician, the way to perform music on stage is always accompanied with some doubts and decisions that are made during its way to a concert performance regarding all kinds of aspects while playing. Therefore, this paper is critically viewing the factors that have an impact on musicians along the study of a piece.To be able to present the different factors Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor op. 57 has been analyzed from the point of view of my own interpretation and the interpretation of Shostakovich himself on the piano together with two different quartets: the Beethoven and Borodin Quartet. This in order to clarify and find ways to understand the way Shostakovich himself wanted the music he produced to sound.The study showed that even though Shostakovich was very accurate with his notation in the scores, the music was performed differently depending on the musicians. Music itself is not only produced and generated by the composer likewise the musicians themselves have not only their own thoughts to consider, but also four greater factors: the musician’s technical abilities, the composer’s biography, historical knowledge and the use of both recordings and visuals to receive a more accurate understanding of the music. All this in order to produce an objectively more correct way of playing and to fulfill the intentions of the composer, which also showed can be dependent on the musicians.

2.

Abrahamian, Karineh

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Theology, Department of Theology.

In my BA project, I travelled to Tanzania with a MFS stipend and experienced humanitarian architecture up close - by following architectural group Asant Collective´s project in Tanzania: a new Children Centre for a small non-governmental organization called ECONEF.

I have worked with social questions / responsibilities regarding our role as interior architects in developing countries - often feeling like a anthropologist.

In my design part, I have re-drawed the layout for ECONEF´s planned new orphanage after a analyse of the existing orphanage, culture and traditions.

This doctoral thesis investigates popular romance, a mass-cultural genre with a large female audience. Popular romance is often considered ”lowbrow” and is referred to by terms such as ”porn” and ”garbage”. The female reader of this so called “sentimental trash” is often portrayed as naïve and unworldly. The thesis makes this derogatory view of the genre its point of departure, to investigate what cultural understandings of gender and sexuality the critique against popular romance entails. The thesis further investigates how these conceptions of gender and sexuality deviate from and challenge a culturally promoted and normative sexuality.

The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter describes the selection of the empirical material and the theoretical and methodological framework. The empirical material consists of the three novels in the popular series Fifty Shades of Grey and the four novels and five films in the popular series Twilight. The thesis places itself within the field of feminist cultural studies and queer theory. It makes use of the concept of masturbation (both literal and figurative) as an analytical entry point and as a method focusing on the “here and now” of romance reading.

The second chapter contextualizes the study by defining the term “popular romance” and by providing a brief historical overview of the genre. Previous research on popular romance is presented and discussed in relation to the derogatory view of the genre.

The third chapter studies the Swedish media commentaries on Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight to define how the rejected romance reader is conceptualized, and how this romance reader is presumed to be reading. This “romance reader” is thereafter discussed in relation to the Western historical discourse on masturbation, “female illness” and (women’s) private reading. The chapter closes with a discussion on the form of reading that the romance reader is associated with. This self-immersed, excessive and over-invested reading form is defined as “masturbatory”.

The fourth chapter explores the act of romance reading when defined as a sexual activity. The romance community is compared to the “second wave” feminism of the 1970s in order to demonstrate how the genre establishes a separatist female community where relations, positions, and identifications are in motion, revealing both homoerotic and autoerotic elements to this homosocial context.

In the fifth chapter, a close reading of the material is performed with a focus on the “here and now” of the reading situation. The dichotomy of desiring subject and desired object is problematized in relation to looks and gaze. The thesis argues that the romance text uses detailed and intimate descriptions to instill a sexual charge and to freeze the flow of the storyline in order to make room for constant erotic contemplation. These “frozen moments” and the repetitiveness of the genre are discussed in relation to theories of queer temporality. The romance text constructs a room “outside of time” that privileges the overwhelming pleasures of the “here and now”. This liminal room is not only available for the heroine and hero of the story, but for the romance reader as well.

The sixth and final chapter ties together the main arguments of the thesis in an overarching discussion on how conceiving romance reading as a form of masturbation challenges previous research on popular romance and the gendering of and contempt for mass culture.

5.

Acerbi, Alberto

et al.

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution.

We use the term regulatory traits to indicate traits that both regulate cultural transmission (e.g., from whom to learn) and are themselves culturally transmitted. In the first part of this contribution we study the dynamics of some of these traits through simple mathematical models. In particular, we consider the cultural evolution of traits that determine the propensity to copy others, the ability to influence others, the number of individuals from whom one may copy, and the number of individuals one tries to influence. We then show how to extend these simple models to address more complex human cultural phenomena, such as ingroup biases, the emergence of open or conservative societies, and of cyclical, fashion-like, increases and decreases of popularity of cultural traits. We finally discuss how the ubiquity of regulatory traits in cultural evolution impacts on the analogy between genetic and cultural evolution and therefore on the possibility of using models inspired by evolutionary biology to study human cultural dynamics.

We call "regulatory traits" those cultural traits that are transmitted through cultural interactions and, at the same time, change individual behaviors directly influencing the outcome of future cultural interactions. The cultural dynamics of some of those traits are studied through simple simulations. In particular, we consider the cultural evolution of traits determining the propensity to copy, the number of potential demonstrators from whom one individual may copy, and conformist versus anti conformist attitudes. Our results show that regulatory traits generate peculiar dynamics that may explain complex human cultural phenomena. We discuss how the existence and importance of regulatory traits in cultural evolution impact on the analogy between genetic and cultural evolution and therefore on the possibility of using evolutionary biology inspired models to study human cultural dynamics.

Behavioral “traditions”, i.e. behavioral patterns that are acquired with the aid of social learning and that are relativelystable in a group, have been observed in several species. Recently, however, it has been questioned whether non-human sociallearning is faithful enough to stabilize those patterns. The observed stability could be interpreted as a result of various constraintsthat limit the number of possible alternative behaviors, rather than of the fidelity of transmission mechanisms. Those constraints canbe roughly described as “internal”, such as mechanical (bodily) properties or cognitive limitations and predispositions, and “external”, such as ecological availability or pressures. Here we present an evolutionary individual-based model that explores the relationships between the evolution of faithful social learning and behavioral constraints, represented both by the size of the behavioral repertoire and by the “shape” of the search space of a given task. We show that the evolution of high-fidelity transmission mechanisms, when associated with costs (e.g. cognitive, biomechanical, energetic, etc.), is only likely if the potential behavioral repertoire of a species is large and if the search space does not provide information that can be exploited by individual learning. Moreover we show how stable behavioral patterns (“traditions”) can be achieved at the population level as an outcome of both high-fidelity and low-fidelity transmission mechanisms, given that the latter are coupled with a small behavioral repertoire or with a search space that provide substantial feedback. Finally, by introducing the possibility of environmental change, we show that intermediaterates of change favor the evolution of faithful social learning.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine the collaboration between school librarians and teachers in primary school, in order to illustrate how the two professions can work together, how they see their own roles and how they look at the other professionals´ roles. We also discuss earlier studies in LIS concerning collaboration between teachers and librarians. The method of investigation is qualitative interviews with practicing school librarians and teachers, we interviewed three school librarians and three teachers from three different schools in the same county. As a basis of the discussion and analysis Andrew Abbott's theory of professions is used. The thesis shows that collaboration differs between the schools. The difference in itself depends on the schools principal views of the school library. The professions need to develop their understanding for each other´s roles and competences in order to develop the best possible collaboration.

This bachelor thesis’ purpose is to investigate how purchase librarians work with foreign language collection management. Since about 15% of the citizens of Sweden are born abroad or have a foreign background, the subject of investigation becomes relevant because it touches a wide user group of the public library.

Interviews were conducted with four librarians responsible for purchasing of foreign literature. The purpose of these interviews was to investigate which underlying strategies and thoughts are used as a basis for purchasing.

Since the library act does not include guidelines regarding the content of the foreign literature collection, how is the literature chosen and to what purpose?

As a theoretical framework a self-developed model was used to categorize the foreign literature into its different functions. The foreign literature was divided into two main categories; entertainment reading and literature with an informative purpose.

To display the librarians room for interpretation factor in the purchasing of literature a theory from sociology studies was applied, the theory of room for maneuver.

The findings in this paper have revealed that literature with the purpose to entertain was prioritized in the purchasing. Even though the libraries included multicultural activities in their organization, by prioritizing the entertainment literature the library tended to deprioritize the potential integration purpose of the literature.

The paper also revealed that the individual responsible for the purchasing was left with a large room for interpretation, which meant that one individual had the responsibility to ensure that the literature was relevant and versatile enough for the user group.

This essay studies the concept of "livspusslet", a term in swedish that directly translates as "the jigsaw puzzle of life". In recent public debate it has been used to articulate issues concerning the combination of family life and a professional career. The empirical material consists of newspaper articles from nationwide daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet between 2009 and 2011. The concept of "livspusslet" relates to the debate about family values, gender equality and the public view on the issue of combining family life with a career. The widespread use of the concept indicates that the social practices surrounding the debate over family policy is shifting. This essay aims to answer questions of what meanings the concept of "livspusslet" is filled with in the studied articles, who has the legitimacy to articulate the problems surrounding the combination of family life and a career and it what matter the meanings of the concept changes from one article to another.

The public libraries were quick to adapt to the changes that the Internet brought on, and today library websites are an important part of the public library. To meet the needs of teens today, the library website could offer a range of contents to make it an attractive place on many levels; both the academic needs as well as social and recreational needs should be addressed.

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate public library websites for teenagers in Sweden, and to examine how well the websites address the developmental tasks and needs that teenagers have. The method used is website evaluation, one quantitative and one qualitative. A total of 60 public library sites for teenagers were evaluated, using 11 criteria based on Havighursts developmental tasks. The quantitative evaluation measured how many functions each website had per criteria, and showed that the majority of the sites had one or two functions for most of the criteria. The qualitative evaluation showed that the websites with the highest score often offered more interactive solutions, had more dynamic content and therefore met the needs of teenagers better than the websites with a lower ranking. Overall, the public library websites for teenagers could gain from developing their content and services further, taking into consideration the needs and developmental tasks that teenagers have that separates them from other user groups.

How can you do a right measurement of culture as well as with other social sectors and with what can culture contribute when it comes to a town´s development? We found out that in Linköping the regional federation Ostsam recently (2005) started mapping the region's creative centers in order to look into the spreading of the culture in the county, and then use the uniqueness of the culture as an advantage in society- planning contexts. The reason was that both municipal - and State directions detected that the culture has a broader importance when it comes to building up society and infrastructure than earlier considered. This is called Cultural planning and is the foundation- method that Östsam used when working with their new projekt The creative sector. The outcome of the Östsam study resulted in an exciting study basis to work further on with and to examine through own demarcations and directions.

This research manages the matter of the creative sector as an extension to the cultural sector. Our aim with this report is to find out the concept of the creative sector, what it stands for, and also to look into how the creative sector runs in practice.

The purpose with this study is to examine what kind of support there is for school libraries at the selected independent upper secondary schools and how these schools ensure that libraryservices is available to their students and their teachers. The purpose is also to examine what attitudes the administrators of the schools have to school libraries and teaching in information seeking. A qualitative method with interviews was used to fulfil the purpose. As a theoretical basis of the study Loertschers taxonomies of the school library media program and Limbergs three levels of pedagogic research were used and the interviews were analysed with these two theoretical frameworks as a background. The result of the study showed that neither one of the three examinated schools has a school library which means that they use the public library instead. The problematic area is the lack of rules within the school library field and the fact that the independent schools do not show any interest of cooperating with the public library. The conclusion is probably to make an agreement between the schools and the public library and to make the administrators literate about the positive effects which come out of a well provided school library.

Today, one of the foremost tools used by the library staff is the library catalogue search tools. It has come to our understanding that some library staff are dissatisfied with how the search tools works. The aim of this study is to illuminate the library staff's negative experiences of the search tools, and to present a basis for future discussion and development. To our help we have used a quantitative survey which were sent to library staff that used one of the two largest integrated library systems in Sweden, BOOK-IT and Mikromarc. The questions regarded the library staff's perception of a number of features in the search tools. The results showed that in general, the overall impression of the catalogue search tools were positive, even though dissatisfaction with specific features could be observed, e.g. the system's way of handling misspellings and the ability to search the catalogue when the system is offline. This study can be seen as a small step on the way to better search tools in the library catalogue, giving the library staff better and more effective ways of providing service to the library users.

Abstract This paper has investigated two urban planning ideals that emerges in the planning process. The study's starting point has been sustainable development to study the two existing urban planning ideals today. This means that the compact city and the green city has been the main focus of this study, but sustainability has large space with many of the aspects that is expected to lead to sustainable development. A case study was used to investigate how Karlstad is working on the issue and how the paradox appears in the municipal planning. Karlstad is currently developing a new green structure plan. The study's empirical evidence is based on two interviews with Karlstad municipality officials. The municipal documents Karlstad municipality's comprehensive plan (2012) and Olmårs densification study (2007) has been used. The municipal documents and the interview material was analyzed through meaning content. The study's analysis is based on the study's empirical and theoretical background which shows that there is a paradox in Karlstad municipality's urban planning. It also shows a trend in which cities aim to achieve the sustainable city. As the concept of sustainability is a diffuse concept, the compact city and the green city has become a complex strategy to achieve the sustainable city. This means that the green and compact city can be viewed from several different angles. Karlstad municipality's vision of the compact city is to have a compact city especially in the central parts of the city. These areas are green areas today. A planning dilemma between the aspirations of the planning arises, in which these must be weighed against each other. This means that if the green structure is prioritized then another aspect must be weighed out. In other words; there is a paradox in Karlstad municipal´s urban planning, and this means that if the green structure priority needs another aspect weighed out. This means that there is a paradox in municipal urban planning, and this is shown in this paper.

In Finland, thousands of miles away from Buenos Aires, people crowd the dance floors of restaurants and dance halls nightly to dance to tango music, while the tango has also caught the heart of the people on the other side of the world in Japan. The popularity of the tango in both Finland and Japan, however, is not very well known to the outside world.

Though some scholars have stated that the tango reflects the personality, mentality and identity of the Finnish and Japanese people, this may only be partially true. Moreover, it is difficult to generalize what the Finnish or Japanese personality is. I argue that the tango's success in these two countries also has significant connections to historical and social factors. As being a dancer myself, I also believe that the 'liminality' (originally a term borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's formulation of rites de passage) of tango dancing plays an important role in these two nations that went through difficult struggles to recover from the damage caused by the war. “The liminal phase is considered sacred, anomalous, abnormal and dangerous, while the pre- and post-liminal phases are normal and a profane state of being (Selänniemi 1996) and “the regular occurrence of sacred-profane alternations mark important periods of social life or even provide the measure of the passage of time itself”(Leach 1961).

In this paper, I will discuss motives and paths of how a culture travels, settles and shapes into a new form, using the tango as an example.

Teaching communicative competence is extremely important in language instruction. One can avoid embarrassing situations and conflicts caused by misunderstandings if she/he understands the differences in intercultural pragmatics. Politeness discourse varies in complexity according to social distance, relative power between the speakers, and situations. The data I have collected during the past 6 years indicates that Swedish learners of Japanese often do not see the necessity of learning the polite/honorific discourse and often view these negatively as Swedish society is one of the most egalitarian in the world. As a consequence, Swedish students often fail to utilize appropriate politeness strategies when speaking in Japanese. However, it is important to point out to foreign language learners that cultural and social norms are not interchangeable and that one must adapt to the language one is using and the culture one is in. Thus Swedish Learners of Japanese should consider politeness discourse as a part of the rules of the language rather than something that can be modified based on one’s opinion.

The current study investigates the differences in politeness strategies between Swedish and Japanese discourse. Student surveys and analysis of students’ errors have revealed clear differences in the use of politeness strategies in Swedish and in Japanese context. While the politeness, respect, and formality are closely intertwined in Japanese; the Swedes perceive respect and politeness as separate matters. It is also found that while the Japanese are inclined to using verbal politeness strategies, the Swedes express their respect more through non-verbal actions or behaviors. Various Japanese and Swedish utterances have also been examined to determine the Discourse Politeness Default suggested by Usami (2006) in order to systematize the politeness strategies in ways similar to grammatical rules.

Thousands of refugees have immigrated to Turkey because of the current Civil War in neighboring Syria. This is causing tensions between refugees and locals. These increasingly negative attitudes towards the incoming victims of conflict are of particular interest. The present study, therefore, aimed at determining the premises of the emergence of such negative attitudes. The research sample consisted of university students who all studied at various faculties at Cumhuriyet University in the Turkish province of Sivas. Data were collected by the Attitude Scale Towards Refugees, the Patriotism Attitude Scale, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and the Cirhinlioğlu Religiosity Scale. Data were analyzed by Independent Sample t-tests as well as using Stepwise Regression Analyses. Results showed that the feeling of empathy correlated negatively with negative attitudes towards refugees, while blind patriotism, religiosity, and having nationalist/conservative orientations, correlated positively. Men were found to be more negative than women. The feeling of empathy was the most prominent factor in predicting the nature of attitudes towards refugees. Religious doctrine and distancing oneself from conservative and patriotic perspectives appeared to be effective in potentially preventing the development of negative attitudes. In conclusion, research results are discussed in the light of relevant literature.

In this paper we have had as purpose to analyze the discourse about motherhood as it shows in media which appeal to mothers. This is in order to get an understanding about standards and valuations existing in today´s community concerning what it means to be a mother. The paper´s empiric material consists of the magazine Mama, which appeal to mothers with children younger than 12 years of age. We have with the help of an attempt of a discourse analysis analyzed how the motherhood discourse is reproduced and constructed in the material, and we can in our analysis see that it in the magazine is conveyed a message about what a mother "is" and "should" be. It is even evident that in the material there are pictures and texts where the mother has the basic responsibility for the children and for the home, and that these pictures strengthen the motherhood discourse. They become an accordingly normative ideal for mothers to endeavor. We also see in our analysis that there is a conception that a woman is expected to fulfil and balance different roles in many fields, as an example you should be able to combine being a good mother, career woman and a wife at the same time. And it is very important to be a great success in all these fields

30.

Aller San Millán, Mario

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Theology, Department of Theology.

What has happened with the perception that Europeans have of their relationship with the European Union through the years? Is it possible to find some analogies between present times and international relations in the XIX century Europe?

This work tries to study the period comprehended between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the period that ended up in World War I in order to search for behavioural and ideological patterns similar to those of the development of the European Union as we have known it.

The thesis stands for the idea of that finding similarities and interconnections between the past of European nations may be a help to predict the proper way to integrate the different citizenries of current European countries under a common identity of shared values.

This essay seeks to wean interculturality from its comfort zone of flat substitutability across cultural differences by pushing for the possibility of other ways of thinking about the concept depending on where (the geopolitics of knowledge) and by whom (the bodypolitics of knowledge) it is being articulated. In order to make a case for the importance of always considering the geopolitical and bodypolitical dimension of knowledge production within interculturality, this essay shifts focus away from policies of the European Union and UNESCO to the Andean region of Latin America. In that part of the world the notion of interculturalidad – translation: interculturality – is not only a subject on the educational agenda, it has also become a core component among indigenous social movements in their push for decolonization. With reference points drawn from a decolonial perspective and the concept of “colonial difference”, this essay makes the case that interculturalidad, with its roots in the historical experience of colonialism and in the particular, rather than in assertions of universality, offers another perspective on interculturality bringing into the picture other epistemologies. It concludes by arguing for the requirement to start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

At the centre of Decolonising Intercultural Education is a simple yet fundamental question: is it possible to learn from the Other? This book argues that many recent efforts to theorise interculturality restrict themselves to a variety of interpretations within a Western framework of knowledge, which does not necessarily account for the epistemological diversity of the world.

The book suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, framed not in terms of cultural differences, but in terms of colonial difference. It brings analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad into the picture and explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook, seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

Decolonising Intercultural Education will be of interest to educational practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in in the areas of education, postcolonial studies, Latin American studies and social sciences.

If the production of knowledge in Latin America has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions —from liberation theology, popular education, participatory action research, alternative communication and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options—have sought to shift the geography of reason. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning and knowledge.

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

This paper scrutinises the ways in which students who have completed a university course on interculturality distinguish between sameness and otherness in attempts to integrate, relate to and build a bridge to those deemed culturally different. It makes use of interviews to analyse the factors that shape the interpretation of otherness and difference in the students’ definitions of interculturality, as well as their statements about the relationships between us and them, and descriptions of instances of learning and teaching that have taken place between parties in different parts of the world. Theoretically, the paper is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing influence of colonialism and Eurocentric ways of reasoning inside as well as outside the classroom in today’s society. One of the main conclusions of the paper is that in the process of transferring knowledge, there is a risk that the history of modern Europe will be sanctioned as the historical trajectory for the rest of the world to follow, with the accompanying supposition that this can only be made possible by extending a helping hand to the Other.

The award-winning Johan Vilde comicseries deals with what has been referred to as a concealed part of Swedish history – namely Sweden’s involvement in the slave trade during the seventeenth century. The protagonist is a cabin boy on a Swedish merchant ship who is forced to escape after being accused of mutiny. After jumping ship, he floats ashore in Cabo Corso – located in modern-day Ghana – where he is eventually adopted by a local clan and grows up in an African kingdom. From there, he will go on to witness the harshness and brutality of the slave trade with his own eyes. Comprising four albums published between 1977 and 1982, the comic aligns itself with, and is a prime popular cultural example of, what can be classified in broad terms as a wave of international solidarity movements in Sweden. What this essay discusses is how the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist underpinnings of the Johan Vilde series rekindle a much older Romanticist position. This essay will argue that this well-intended ethically dimension of attempting to subvert the imperially established border between civilisation and where the wild things roam also relies on a position produced by colonial discourse.

This essay explores the ways in which boundaries of estrangement are produced in the academic literature assigned for courses on interculturality. As the existence of interculturality is dependent on the ascription of content to culture, since the notion, by definition, always involves more than one singular culture, this essay seeks to provide an answer to the question of what this literature implicitly defines in terms of sameness vis-à-vis otherness and thereby chart the conditions for becoming intercultural. This question is especially important because theself in interculturality has to be, in principle, generalizable: it should be such that it signifies a position available for occupation by anybody with proper training in this approach. Starting from the assumption that different experiences, languages and identities, under the name of culture already intersect, and are contaminated by, one another, and are therefore already intercultural before being subjected to study under the auspices of ‘interculturality’ as an educational topic, the essay goes on toproblematize the way in which interculturality tends to construe sameness and difference along national lines and does little to cater for multiple, as opposed to national, or other unified, identities.

The Phantom, an American comic about a superhero of British heritage set in a fictional African country, is held in highest esteem elsewhere, regarded as a national institution in Australia, New Zealand and much of Scandinavia. Since the early 1960s, officially licensed scripts have been produced by the Swedish-based scriptwriters of ‘Team Fantomen’ who today remain the major suppliers of adventures to the Phantom comics around the world. This essay suggests that this shift in the scripts’ geographical origin also altered the politics of the comic: in the hands of Team Fantomen, the masked hero is instilled with political doctrines reflected in Swedish foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This ideological shift means that the masked hero moves away from the role of colonialist fantasy prevalent in the American scripts to become a supporter of decolonization, social justice, and equality. The Phantom becomes an avatar of democratic socialist ideology, the episodes offering a direct commentary on Sweden’s perception of its own role in the world as a leading proponent of international solidarity.

Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the socio-political context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress, salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome.

After long periods of military dictatorships, civil wars, and economic instability, Latin America has changed face, and become the foremost region for counter-hegemonic processes. This book seeks to address contemporary paradigms of education and learning in Latin America. Although the production of knowledge in the region has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions – from liberation theology, popular education, and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options – have sought to shift the geography of reason.

Over the last decades, several Latin American communities have countered this movement by forming some of the most dynamic and organised forms of resistance: from the landless movements in Brazil to the Zapatistas in the Chiapas region of Mexico, from the indigenous social movements in Bolivia to Venezuela’s Chavistas, to mention but a few. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions, and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies, and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning, and knowledge. Consequently, this book transcends disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological boundaries in education and learning by engagement with ‘other’ paradigms.